


Confiteors

by R_Knight



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Epistolary, F/M, M/M, Multi, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:34:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27647585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/R_Knight/pseuds/R_Knight
Summary: The following letters were compiled by Captain B.J Hunnicutt’s daughter posthumously, most gathered from the desk of her late father, although some she obtained from the Benjamin Franklin Pierce estate. The full collection of letters have been compiled alongside photographs in a retelling of her father’s experience during the Korean war and his time spent recovering in the years after.The book’s title, ‘Confiteors’, comes both from the frank, confessional style of the letters, as well as from a direct quote lifted from one of the replies recovered from Benjamin ‘Hawkeye’ Pierce. “Don’t you think I don’t know what you’re doing,” he writes, “you wiley catholics and your confiteors [sic]*, trying to trick us into bearing our immortal souls to your God. Well it won’t work, darling, because my confessions to you are for your eyes and your eyes only.”
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, B. J. Hunnicutt/Peg Hunnicutt
Comments: 10
Kudos: 40





	Confiteors

**Author's Note:**

> This might be the beginning of something, I'm not sure. I just wanted to throw it on here until I decide whether to continue.

**Confiteors: Gay Letters From The Desk of B.J Hunnicutt**

The following letters were compiled by Captain B.J Hunnicutt’s daughter posthumously, most gathered from the desk of her late father, although some she obtained from the Benjamin Franklin Pierce estate. The full collection of letters have been compiled alongside photographs in a retelling of her father’s experience during the Korean war and his time spent recovering in the years after. The book’s title, ‘ _Confiteors_ ’, comes both from the frank, confessional style of the letters, as well as from a direct quote lifted from one of the replies recovered from Benjamin ‘Hawkeye’ Pierce. “Don’t you think I don’t know what you’re doing,” he writes, “you wiley catholics and your confiteors [sic]*, trying to trick us into bearing our immortal souls to your God. Well it won’t work, darling, because my confessions to you are for your eyes and your eyes only.” 

Although the biography certainly doesn’t shy away from the reality of Hunnicutt’s romantic feelings towards Pierce, nor does it state anything explicitly. Erin Hunnicutt offers a glimpse into the life of her father, allowing us to come to our own conclusions about who he was beyond the scrubs, the military career. The following excerpts in this article are from letters that directly reference the relationship between the Hunnicutt and Pierce. For a more comprehensive exploration of BJ Hunnicutt’s life and relationship with Benjamin Pierce during and after the Korean war, _Confiteors_ will be available on hardback from 23rd July 1998. 

*Confiteor means ‘I confess’. Pierce is referencing a Catholic prayer here that is often spoken at the beginning of Mass, so named for its first word, _Confiteor_. Considering how well-read we know Pierce was, the grammatical error made in pluralising it was likely intentional.

* * *

1.

Here, what do I call you now? Do I address this letter to my brother-in-arms? My work-wife? An old acquaintance? I can’t remember calling you anything other than Hawkeye, but when I put my pen to paper I find I just can’t make myself do it. It doesn’t seem right. Hawkeye was the other you, in another time, another place. Just like Hunnicut was the other me. Maybe even BJ was another me, too, but what else do I have? I don’t think I’d survive you calling me Bea. 

I don’t know that you’d appreciate me calling you Pierce, either, let alone Benjamin. So how about this: 

Hawk, 

It has been too long. I find myself forgetting as much as I remember, these days. Maybe it’s to keep myself sane. If I remember all the people I treated, all the death I saw and the trauma our country helped create, I worry I’d never leave my bed. If I let myself think about the good things though - the lightness in the dark, the good men I met....If I let myself think of you, I don’t worry what I’d do, because I _know._ I know that if I think too hard I’d do something irrational, like come and find you. Thank God the war is over, because if nothing else I don’t have to worry about you back there still. I’d be tearing my hair out trying to figure out a way to get you discharged, although perhaps this letter would have been sufficient. You know well enough that I’m not good at hiding how I really feel. Neither of us are, really. What a pair we made, what fools we were - war surgeons with our hearts stitched to our sleeves, a target for whoever cared to notice. 

I can imagine your face, reading this. I can imagine your raised eyebrows, pretending to scoff at my words. We may be the same open books, but we read different, you and I. My pages are simple and straight forward and too genuine. Yours are more complex. Pages and pages full of levity, but with a sincerity pressed into the binding. 

Now if you didn’t scoff at _that_ I’ll eat my hat. If I was too earnest before, I’m getting worse in my old age. I guess I’ll leave it here before I say something I can’t take back. 

Missing you. 

B.J

__________

2.a

Hawk,

I know you love when I’m blasphemous. How’s this for sinning: I have thought about you endlessly since the war ended. I thought of you in the helicopter home, I thought of you as I saw my wife and daughter again, I thought of you as I drove back to my house ~~,~~ ~~and I thought of you~~

You told me you read Augustine’s confessions, once upon a time. I think you said you wanted something to keep you occupied in the latrine, and Father Mulcahy was the only guy with reading material that didn’t start and end with naked women. I don’t know if you’d remember it. If you’d care. But stay with me, because I think you’ll enjoy where this particular blasphemy is going: 

Augustine asks his God, “What art Thou to me? In Thy pity, teach me to utter it... Say unto my soul, I am thy salvation. So speak, that I may hear. Behold Lord, my heart is before Thee... Hide not thy face from me. Let me die -lest I die- only let me see Thy face.”

So speak, dear friend, that I may hear. Let me see you again, in ink if nothing else. I know you received my last letters. So let me see. Even to tell me never to speak to you again, I don’t care - really I don’t. I don’t. Just write me back, Hawkeye. Just this once.

Your dear friend, whether you like it or not,

  
B.J

__________

2.b

_B.J,_

_Sorry for the dead air. It took me a good long while to find my marbles again after coming home, I’ll tell you that. I’m not good company when I’m like that, so I thought I’d wait a while, ‘til I felt more normal. Only I never really felt normal again. I’m better , sure. My heads on straight, I’m back in scrubs ~~although I’m steering clear of paediatric wards~~ I but I don’t know that I’ll ever be normal again. So when your last letter came, before I even read it I thought, well, fuck. Be brave again, man. Write your good old pal B.J. _

_And then I read it. You damned fool. I’d tell you you write like a lovesick woman, but that would be doing lovesick women a disservice. You have a family, you were supposed to forget about me. How do you want me to reply? Do you want me to say sure, to hell with it, be ready at 2200 and I’ll meet you at the curb? Whisk you away to Maine and forget your old family? C’mon man._

_The worst thing is that I want to do it. I’m a selfish man. I want to steal you away from your perfect wife and your perfect daughter. I want to retire with you to a big city, a tiny village, the damned Swiss Alps if that’s what you wanted. I want that, you fool. You say you lay your heart, you ask me what I am to you, but I think you know already. I’m sorry for going cold on you, but you’re smart enough to know what it means when I tell you that what you were to me then, you still are to me now. But I know you, and I know that you’d never survive the guilt of leaving Peggy and Erin. I can be selfless in this, at least._

_Not selfless enough to ignore your letters though. More fool me._

_\- Hawk_

_P.S: I do appreciate the blaspheming. You really know how to get a guy going, even after all this time. But it would have been more fun if you’d gone for a euphemism. How about this line? “Narrow the mansion of my soul; enlarge Thou it, that Thou mayest enter in.” Then I could say something like ‘I’d enter your enlarged soul any time, sweetheart.’_

__________

2.c

Ass,

I wait months for a reply and _this_ is what you give me? Of course I wasn’t asking for you to kidnap me after dusk. Of course I wouldn’t abandon my family. I just ~~wanted to needed~~ wanted to speak with you again. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. There’s no hidden messages here Hawk, no requests for white knightery hidden between the lines. I just want to speak to you. Talk to the man that once upon a time spent every waking hour with me for days on end. But I’d forgotten what it’s like to know you. How you can be so caustic in your selflessness, so bitter in your own martydom. My memories of you are so rosy I really do forget. So let me be clear, Hawk. I am not looking for a saviour. I am not looking for a martyr.

I am asking for a friend. I hope that’s alright by you.

B.J

Ps: That was terrible and I regret bringing it up.

__________

2.d

_B.J,_

_You are a bitter old man BJ, and it suits you fantastically. I remember when I first saw you, all buttoned up and tidy like a doll. How lovely you were with your fresh shave, your bright eyes. Well, the war saw to that quickly. Or maybe I saw to it quicker, degenerate that I am. Bitter martyr that I may be. Fine, fine. I see your point, I’ll let up. You can write me still, and I can answer you too and we can have a grand old time pretending that you didn’t tell me I was your salvation. Didn’t offer your heart to me._

_I’d have it, if you were really offering. But you knew that already, didn’t you?_

_\- Hawk_

__________

3.

_B.J,_

_ You like poetry more than I do. Or, you write it better at least. When I read your letters I imagine you making notes first, writing a first draft, maybe a second by hand before you finally let yourself put your hands on the type writer and offer me your pretty words. I know you’ve never been the type to write meter, but it’s poetry all the same.  _

_ You remember that book of Owen poetry we read that one time? Poured over it, really, heads tucked together like naughty schoolboys, until Burns found it in the swamp and threw it away. Surprised he didn’t burn it. Well, you probably remember the sad stuff, you were quoting it at me for weeks after. It stuck with me too. There was another poem though, that I remember so vividly it’s as if we were still there together, heads so close I could feel your breath on my face as you mouthed the words. I can’t really remember how it went, but I remember there was a cross. I remember the guy was meant to kiss it but he kissed the hand of the guy holding it instead. I remember your inhale after reading that line and I remember the way you couldn’t look anyone in the eye for the rest of the day.  _

_ I remember wondering why it had affected you so much, when we’d read more salacious stuff before - said more to each other, even in jest. I think maybe it was the shock of it. The unexpectedness. How does a man prepare himself for something like that anyway? the quick sharp sting of a bullet, of a needle to the arm, but this, straight to the chest? It hit me too, in my own way, but the effect it had on you hit me worse. You’re a perfect christian husband and father, indubitably faithful, but the secret deviance we share, the niggling of our hearts in a direction we wish it wouldn’t go - it fits your image less than it fits mine. And bypassing the heart of your faith in who you should be and going straight to the very flesh that tests it - i’m not surprised the poem got to you. _

_How long has it been since I last wrote anyway? I lost track of myself again. My kids probably think what a silly old fool lost in his own head and his own memories, senile before he needs to be. Or maybe they think goodness, look at him, pondering life and all its quirks, so smart is our father. Why not both, I say. I can wonder at the reasons for war. I can think about the men we saved, the men we didn’t and wonder at the real cost of it all. Not just the dead, not especially the dead. They were the lucky ones, I figure. Anyway, so I can think about that if I want, and I can remember the stupid hat you used to wear if I want, too. Ugly as sin. Smelt like shit, too. I can’t even remember where you got it now, but it exists for me a pervading image of you, of the war. Not the blood, the terror, the mud. Just an idiot in a hat with stolen socks. Can you tell I’m feeling maudlin? Anyway. Write me if you have the time. Write me still if you don’t. I’ll be waiting._

_\- Hawk_


End file.
